How we turned a YouTube traffic crash into 22% more views [+ free resource]

On a long enough timeline, every marketer will face their own horror show. That pit-of-your-stomach dread when something goes terribly wrong.

Today, I got permission to share a scary story of our own: When our Español YouTube team discovered their entire catalog had plunged by over 10% in viewership overnight. 😱

But fear not, this story has the kind of happy ending usually only found on the silver screen. Plus, tips to make your own happily-ever-after, and your very own copy of the tracking template our YT team uses every day.

Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society Marketing Against the Grain audience, I call this story: The tale of how one YT channel turned a library-wide traffic plunge into a 22% increase in views.

Headwinds of horror

“The Español channel saw some… headwinds,” says Nelson Chacón Guzman, politely describing a sudden 12% channel-wide drop in views. (When I saw the screenshots, even I had to yell, “¡Caray!”)

“A lot of our videos were embedded in articles on the HubSpot blog,” he explains. This was a great source of activated traffic until the blog team had to make some big strategy changes early last year.

“When the blog audited and sunsetted old articles, we saw a correlating drop in our library.” And since those views were coming from a relevant, highly-engaged audience, losing that traffic created an outsized drop in lead conversion, as well.

This is where a lot of marketers would have simply written off the losses. You can’t beg another team to go against their own metrics.

But Guzman is a Marketing Fellow for our Audience Development team, and, in HubSpot terms, that means his job description is somewhere between Gandalf and the astronaut guy from The Martian. And he had a plan.

Reigniting that spark

Guzman knew he needed to act fast due to the compounding nature of the YouTube algorithm. When YT sees a loss in traffic, it will often assume a loss of popularity and deprioritize those videos.

But, conversely, when it sees enduring traffic growth, the algorithm often responds by serving that content to a wider audience.

With that in mind, the plan was to “reignite” these videos in the search algorithm, replacing the lost referral traffic with brand new organic search traffic.

To do that, Guzman and his team first used a tool called VidIQ to help identify long-tail keywords that were most relevant to each video.

(Side note: VidIQ is not affiliated with HubSpot, and this is not a paid or partner placement. Our team just happens to use that tool. But if you’re a VidIQ marketer, maybe put me in touch with your boss for a newsletter interview?)

Shiny new keyword targets in hand, the team set out to re-optimize all of the meta-content that surrounds each given video.

“Once the video is uploaded to YouTube, it’s set. There’s nothing you can do [to the video itself],” he says. Instead, “we changed the title, the description, the CTA, the closed captions, the tags, all those things.”

The sudden influx of new keyword signals makes the algorithm want to trial your content in front of audiences and see how they react.

When that happens, it’s critical that your audience engages with your content to reinforce this process. So the final piece of the puzzle is A/B testing new thumbnail images to maximize initial views and watch time.

The result was a 22% increase in overall views and a 16% increase in leads from videos that could have otherwise sat around collecting dust.

Re-writing your happy ending

Even if nothing has gone wrong with your traffic, you can still use this process on old videos that have faded with time, or new videos that haven’t lived up to their potential.

In either case, Guzman shares some tips for reanimating the dead:

1. Think marathon, not sprint.

“We structure the description and title so it’s a slow burner,” he says. The idea is to go after long-term, sustainable growth, not runaway virality. “It accommodates the algorithm, so it starts picking up, picking up, picking up.”

That’s why he and his team target long-tail keywords, instead of high-volume head terms.

Targeting head terms tends to be more suited for brand new videos, where the goal is “more of an immediate reaction. You’re trying to get the videos out and get as much impact as possible. But then the video may not grow.”

2. Spend time in your own library.

Guzman says one of the most important things a marketer can do is to spend time with their own content, paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.

“I try to look at them every week — just go back in and see if the views are increasing or not.”

Over time, this builds a sort of intuition about where to focus your optimization efforts.

“The more you know your library, the more you know which videos have potential, or which could have performed better.”

3. Figure out your own benchmarks.

Another reason to spend time with your content is to cultivate a sense of realistic viewership numbers and timeline. And those are going to be different for every channel.

“Let’s say we packaged a video in a certain way, and we didn’t see the returns that we wanted after X amount of time. Say in the last 48 hours it got less than 100 views,” he gives, purely as an example. “Just go ahead and repackage it completely and go after another keyword.”

Guzman does caution that trend-over-time is more important than immediate results.

“If you’re seeing a consistent source of traffic, be careful not to tweak it too much. You risk that it will just completely drop.”

4. Be realistic. Success looks different for everyone.

Our Español Marketing channel has a healthy ~60,000 subscribers. Meanwhile, our behemoth English Marketing channel boasts over 500,000 subs.

So, if we held them to the same benchmarks, the ES team would spend a lot of unnecessary time re-optimizing videos that are resonating with their audience.

But, while it may not be helpful to compare yourself to other channels, you do need to set a standard.

“When you publish a video, and you don’t get more than X views in a month, you say, ‘Okay, what’s going on?’”

5. Know thyself.

“The strategy your channel has will frame the creatives that go with your video,” Guzman explains. “Are you a search-focused channel with a slow-burner approach? Or are you going for the immediate reaction from your viewers?”

For example, our ES YT channel is a search-focused channel. That means it relies on people searching for a specific topic, rather than the audience anxiously awaiting each new video to drop.

Functionally, that means that titles, descriptions, and thumbnails are designed to give information, rather than provide an eye-catching spectacle.

6. Know thy audience.

Equally important is knowing what resonates with your particular audience.

“For HubSpot Español, we’re going after business owners.” So while a channel like The Hustle might use whimsical titles and funny descriptions, the ES Marketing channel needs to be more straightforward.

“[Our audience says] ‘I’m not here to be entertained. Just show me how to do X, Y, and Z, and I’ll get back to what I was doing.’”

Steal the spreadsheet

Just for you, I’ve smuggled out a copy of the actual spreadsheet our YouTube team uses to track and forecast views and conversions.

Okay, I lied; Nelson made a custom copy for you to download. But it really is based on his personal spreadsheet.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Make a copy of our free tracker.
2. Sign into YouTube Studio and head over to Analytics, then Advanced Mode.
3. Set the desired date range and export a CSV file of your views.
4. Copy and paste your view data into the tab labeled ‘CSV_import_Views’.
5. Download your conversion data from your favorite tool. (Our team happens to use Snowflake.)
6. Paste the conversion data into the tab labeled ‘CSV_Conversions’.
7. Make sure your Video IDs match between the CSV tabs!

Boom! The first tab will now update itself with monthly tracker charts and month-over-month forecasts you can use to quickly monitor the health of your videos!

Note 1: If you download your CSV from YT Analytics directly to Google Sheets, it will format it as long data. To use it in our sheet, you’ll need to switch it to wide data.

Note 2: Our team uses API connectors to automatically import data to the sheet, but we’ve made this one work on copy/paste so that anyone can use it. If you’re feeling spicy, anyone with knowledge of APIs should be able to connect them to this sheet, turning it into an automated diagnostic machine!